REthink Wine Blog

Many of our wineries have asked if they need a blog. My consistent response is “NO WAY!” This goes against the grain of everything that people are saying on the web and even against five people online that I HIGHLY respect and are wonders to the wine and wine blog world (Tom Wark, Mike Duffy, Hugh McLeod, Jeff Lefevere and Josh Hermsmeyer).

Now I am by no means saying that a blog for a winery is bad and should not be done at all. What I am saying is you should have a real strategy for your blog before even undertaking the Herculean effort of blog management.

Oh the irony you say! How can you blog about not blogging? Well every blog has a reason and targets a specific audience. Our reason is to share information about direct and to help wineries sell and marketing wine direct. It is our way to share our wealth of information about direct in a very public forum.

Other blogs are forums for opinion, some are ways to tell news, and some are just vanity journals. Seth Godin has the best article about blogging on the internet and which be found here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog … _there.pdf

Please read it after reading this blog – it will make you think.

But start with this, is it your business or the foundation of your brand marketing to blog? If not, stop even thinking about blogging. As Seth points out, there are 80,000 new blogs every day. Holy Toledo! It makes me ask, are you fighting to compete with getting blog attention at the same time you are fighting to build your brand?

That brings me to my second point – a blog is a LOT of work – a blog needs to almost be a daily exercise (sometimes every other day) and needs to have effort to make the content well written and relevant. Moreover, the key to good blogging is listening to the people that read your blog and responding to their comments. Finally, being alive and well in the blog community requires speaking with respect and knowledge on other people’s blogs (more time). Honestly, this is such a monumental task that we have split our blog into one blog a day by our ENTIRE company. If someone at the company has a good idea, they are more than free to add anytime but with over 25 employees, we each only have to dedicate 1 day a month to keep our blog up to date and fresh (some of us, like myself are insomniacs and add more often).

Again, I am not saying don’t blog, just don’t blog unless it is FUNDAMENTAL to your marketing plan or your target audience. For example, the winery that 100% integrates its blog into its marketing is Hugh Mcleod with http://www.stormhoek.com/ - the best integration of viral blogging, great marketing, and a good party – I think he is great and the blog rocks but imagine trying to replicate his blog marketing – you become a copy cat, not a pioneer like Hugh. Another great winery blogger is Josh Hermsmeyer of http://www.pinotblogger.com who is wonderfully vocal about innovative ideas within the wine industry and not a vicious self promoter about his brand and thus inspires people to read his blog.

I know so many wineries that barely have time to add content to your site or just manage your online store are feeling pressure to add a blog under the illusion that it helps you reach your customers. “You need a blog,” is the constant undercurrent right now – watch out for the flavor of the day and the commitment it is going to requir. Remember when every winery needed streaming video or Flash on their site? Well, it does help you reach a small subset of your customers but there are so many ways to create a relationship that are more meaningful to your audience. Email, phone calls, mailings, and events are 100% more effective than blogs in creating a one on one relationship with the majority of your customers. That should the focus of every winery, creating and maintaining relationships with your customers.

Finally consider the ROI – where is your time best spent, speaking with your customers, making wine, visiting restaurants, managing your online store, or writing a blog? You decide.

I already know how controversial this might be so I’ll leave it here before adding other comments on more how to get more ROI from your efforts and ways to leverage your website and your sales and marketing technology.

Inertia - Powering the Wine Revolution

–Paul Mabray – CEO

This entry was posted by admin on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 12:35 am and is filed under E-commerce, Resources and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.